The public Internet was created as ARPANET, an initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to connect computers for the exchange of data, and to enable command and control functions to be exchanged in case of a nuclear war. In the 1970s, it was split into military and civilian networks, with the civilian network managed by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In the early 1980s, the Secretary of Defense mandated the TCP/IP network protocol, and the NSF gradually turned control of what was now referred to as the public Internet to universities, independent agencies and commercial service providers. During this time, the Internet was used primarily for scientific and academic purposes. With the adoption of HTML and the development of graphical browsers, the public Internet began to shift from a technical character set form of communication, to a delivery medium for all types of content over the World Wide Web (Web) and commercial enterprises entered this segment of the Internet to do business over the rapidly developing Web environment. Initial methods of doing business were focused on using the Web as an alternate to existing direct mail, magazine or television methods of doing business, in which goods were advertised and sold, or content was delivered via the Web in a manner similar to existing methods of doing business.
During this same period of time, the telecommunications industry began to provide a greater percentage of the Internet capacity, both in terms of high speed lines between web sites, and between the individual consumers and small business who connect to the Web through a local telephone Central Office (CO) and an Internet service provider.
Simultaneously, the telecommunications industry recognized that its larger customer were interested in managing portions of their own business provided by the telecommunications enterprise, and began to make some of their management tools available to their customers. In these conventional customer enabled management systems, a connection was made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or work station. This connection frequently, although not always, emulated a terminal addressable by the legacy system. The dial-up access required custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the mid range or main frame computer running the legacy system.
There were several problems associated with this approach:
First, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which required an extensive inventory of software for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions were possible. If the customer hardware platform changed through an upgrade, most of these issues needed renegotiation.
Secondly, dial-up, modem, and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, which required extensive trouble shooting and problem solving capacity for an enterprise wishing to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards were involved.
Third, when an enterprise wished to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system was not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer had to logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. The delivery technology used by the two legacy systems was frequently different, which required different interface standards.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems were frequently quite different, and varied from system to system and platform to platform.
In the context of telecommunications services and products offered by large telecommunications network service providers for their customers, the assignee of the present invention, MCI, has deployed an MCI ServiceView (“MSV”) platform comprising a number of independent legacy systems enabling dial-up connectivity for those customers desiring to obtain the following network management service and reporting data pertaining to their telecommunications networks: priced call detail data and reporting; toll-free network manager “800NM” call routing data; outbound network management data; trouble ticket information; fault manager alarms. Limited interactive toll free network control is additionally supported whereby customers may change the configuration of their toll-free networks and “virtual” networks, i.e., Vnet networks. In addition to the MSV platform, the present assignee has implemented a variety of stand alone applications including: a Traffic View system enabling customers to perform real-time network traffic monitoring of their toll-free networks, and obtain near-real time call detail data and reports, and, a “Hyperscope” reporting system for providing reports on the performance of customers' Broadband (data) networks.
More particularly, MCI's ServiceView platform (“MSV”) provides for the generation of Toll-free Network Management data, priced call detail (“Perspective”) data for usage analysis and trending, each of which requires a different reporting mechanism due to the nature of the data being presented. Such reporting systems typically do not provide any report customization or presentation options for the customer, and any reporting customization is provided by an application specific program running on the client workstation. Furthermore, such systems do not readily provide for the scheduling of periodic or ad hoc “one-shot” reports.
AT&T provides a “Customer Direct” offering, a first part of which is known as the Network Administration System (NAS), and is developing a second part, known as Service Request System (SRS). The NAS program uses a personal computer, a Windows based GUI and analog dial-up access at 9.6 Kbps to AT&T's legacy network switch control systems. When completed, the SRS offering will use the same type of dial-up platform and enable an AT&T customer to order services and features from their desk-top personal computer.
Sprint provides several legacy systems via the Insite service offerings, including Insite PC, Insite ACT and is in the process of developing the Sprint Insite Executive network management program, all making use of a customers personal computer and a dial-up connection. Sprint also announced on Sep. 17, 1996, the Sprint InTouch(SM) product which would enable a customer to open, view, note or close trouble tickets.
These prior art systems, with the excepting of InTouch(SM) all suffer from the aforementioned problems with dial-up telephone connections and legacy applications. Thus, what is needed is a comprehensive system that provides customers with simplified access to a telecommunications provider's products and services that they have subscribed.
The assignee of the present invention has realized that the popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run their own Internet web-browser and utilize their own platform connection to the Internet to enable service. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customers favor, and lets the customer choose their own platform and operating system. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software which the user has already installed and already knows how to use, i.e., the browser. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and dialup software used by the public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard web-browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
The assignee of the present invention has also realized that the use of off-the-shelf web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layouts and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the work station level.
The assignee of the present invention has also realized that providing its management tools to its customers will develop customer loyalty, and more fully integrate the services provided by the telecommunications enterprise with the infrastructure of the customers organization. It is therefore highly desirable to provide these management tools over the public Internet. The public Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various disparate security protocols, telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards, thereby providing a measure of platform independence for the customer.
Furthermore, an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system provides a common GUI for the customer enabling both report requesting, customizing, scheduling and viewing of various types of data from different back-end telecommunications service and applications at a single point of customer contact.